Politifact Lie of the Year: Obama’s “If You Like Your Health Plan You Can Keep It”

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Dec 12, 2013   |   6:48PM   |   Washington, DC

When Congress debated the Obamacare health care law, pro-life advocates were often the one early voice exposing how the law would cause rationing of life-saving care. Obamacare supporters have mocked the claim and the media went after Sarah Palin saying Americans should be concerned about “death panels.”

With Obamacare not yet going into full effect, Americans are already losing their insurance plans.

Now, the fact-checking web site PolitiFact says President Barack Obama’s president that Americans could keep their health insurance under Obamacare is the “Lie of the Year” for 2013:

It was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America’s health insurance system.

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.

But the promise was impossible to keep.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief.  Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.

For all of these reasons, PolitiFact has named “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” the Lie of the Year for 2013. Readers in a separate online poll overwhelmingly agreed with the choice.

Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best.

Instead, he fought back against inaccurate attacks with his own oversimplifications, which he repeated even as it became clear his promise was too sweeping.

The debate about the health care law rages on, but friends and foes of Obamacare have found one slice of common ground: The president’s “you can keep it” claim has been a real hit to his credibility.

We counted dozens of times that President Barack Obama said that if people liked their health plans, they could keep them.

Millions of Americans have lost their health insurance as a result of the rules and regulations of Obamacare.

CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!

 

The stories of families losing their health insurance now that Obamacare is in place are getting more and more heartbreaking. While liberals talk about taking care of children, what about this little girl, who suffers from cancer and, though no fault of their own, her parents are losing their insurance under Obamacare’s rules and regulations.

Witness this family in New York. Cornelius Kelly had no issues securing health insurance under the state Obamacare exchange for his family and some of their children, but their 18-month-old daughter was left out in the cold. He was told she would be required to have her own health insurance policy costing the Kelly family as much as $369 a month.